Martin Scorsese's vanishing New York: One in a never-ending series

With respect to all this “did Ricky Gervais go to far” rumin­a­tion and such: not that I actu­ally give a shit (I think I’ve gone the extra mile in estab­lish­ing my cred­ib­il­ity in this mat­ter, really), but has it ever occurred to any­body that the whole snake-eating-its-own-tail busi­ness does, even­tu­ally, yield some­thing in the way of what you might call dimin­ish­ing returns? And, also, if it’s all such non­sense and mean­ing­less and hypo­crit­ic­al and everything else, why do we (or “we”—and good God, do I hate that for­mu­la­tion) con­tin­ue to watch, or to prop up the edi­fice, or whatever the hell it is that “we” sup­posedly do?

I dunno. It’s more fun to return to the below-cited The King of Comedy, and to con­tem­plate the image of a moment­ar­ily serene Masha (Sandra Bernhard), iron­ic­ally amused at her friend Rupert’s entrance and almost assured ejec­tion from 1633 Broadway, then the Paramount Building. And to note that that Chock Full o’ Nuts is now a Duane Reade. And that the OTB place is now Emmett O’Lunney’s. Emmett is one of the scions of O’Lunney pere, of the joint now over on 45^th Street; Emmett’s broth­er Kevin used to run Kevin St. James on Eighth near 46^th, where they made this not entirely “authen­t­ic” but nev­er­the­less massive and very tasty chick­en parm dish that was the staple of many a Première lunch. That stretch of Eighth Avenue was a big por­tion of a piece I wrote for the VIllage Voice a long time ago, about the “van­ish­ing New York” of a pri­or Scorsese pic­ture, Taxi Driver. I actu­ally got a couple of the loc­a­tions wrong; I placed the porno theat­er where Travis tries to chat up the con­ces­sion girl one build­ing south of where it actu­ally was. Still, it was nicer to think that the place even­tu­ally turned into Little Annie’s Half-Moon Saloon and then the much less skeevy Collins Bar, rather than just got sucked into a lar­ger retail space that sold, well, porn. In any event that whole block is boarded up now; the Disney hotel or whatever the hell they planned on put­ting up there seems to be on reces­sion hold.

But 1633 Broadway’s still there, but it’s no longer the Paramount Building, as it is seen to be in The King of Comedy. For a while I think it was, in fact, the Hachette Filipacchi build­ing. I worked in there twice, the first time in 1993. Across the street—directly where Masha’s gaze is going to—is the Winter Garden Theater. Cats was play­ing there when I’d got­ten a gig at Stereo Review. It had been there since autumn of nine­teen fuck­ing eighty two, which I think means the show took up res­id­ence there not too long after shoot­ing on The King of Comedy wrapped. I remem­ber look­ing down from my office at the Cats mar­quee and think­ing two things. One was, “Our future babies/We’ll take to Abie’s Irish Rose/I hope they’ll live to see/it close.” The oth­er was, “I’ll prob­ably drink myself to death before this fuck­er closes.” I did not. And now Mamma Mia is play­ing there, and I’ve resolved to out­live its run. And my second ten­ure in that build­ing was at Première, from 1996 to 2008. And now Hachette Filipacchi’s not even in that sky­scraper any­more; much stream­lined (as they say), the con­cern has moved from 1633 Broadway over into the Time-Life build­ing, up 50^th Street a bit.

In the book Scorsese on Scorsese, recall­ing the shoot­ing of this pic­ture, Martin Scorsese says, “We were shoot­ing in New York and there were maybe five trail­ers, which you had to park in a cer­tain way because the team­sters wanted this and the police wanted that. Finally, if you wanted to move, the entire com­pany had to go along like a cara­van through the city streets in the day­time. […] We did­n’t get a break from any­body there, or at least that’s how it felt. If we wanted some­thing, we had to pay for it and pay a lot. It was like mak­ing a film with a dino­saur: the tail was so big it was wag­ging and slam­ming into everything, per­haps not inten­tion­ally, but des­troy­ing things[…]” Not to tell tales out of school, but I believe that at the time Scorsese’s office was in the Brill Building, a few doors up from what would have been the Broadway entrance to the Chock Full o’ Nuts; one can ima­gine him hol­ing up there, not hav­ing a great time, maybe even try­ing to hide (“[B]y the second week of shoot­ing I was beg­ging them not to let me go on. I was cough­ing on the floor and sound­ing like a char­ac­ter from The Magic Mountain!”) between setups.